Copyright law forces Google News to close in Spain
Google has said it will close its Google News service in Spain ahead of changes to copyright legislation being rolled out in January.
The company will shut down the service on December 16 before a law that will allow publishers to charge for their content appearing on the platform comes into effect, it said in a blog post.
Launched in 2002, Google News is a free news aggregator provided and operated by the search engine. It selects the most up-to-date information from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm.
Spain’s new guidelines, which make revisions to the Intellectual Property Law, would allow Spanish publications to charge services like Google News if their content is shown.
The changes, dubbed the ‘Google tax’, will require services that post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the Spain-based Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies. It is not yet known how much the fee will be.
But in yesterday’s (December 10) blog post, Richard Gringras, head of Google News, said that as Google News itself makes no money—it does not show any advertising on the site—the new approach is “simply not sustainable”.
“It’s with real sadness that on December 16 (before the new law comes into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain,” Gringras added.
Fidel Porcuna, senior associate at Bird & Bird in Madrid, told WIPR it was expected there would be “some sort of reaction” from the news aggregators.
“Such an announce from Google was perhaps expected by the government when Richard Gingras came to Spain weeks ago to assess the ongoing reform,” he said.
Porcuna added that it is still too soon to know whether the new law will be a success.
“The Spanish Commission Authority concluded in May that the measure is not efficient, and cannot be justified from the competition perspective: it will not regulate the competition between news media and aggregators as such competition seems actually not to exist,” he said.
Google News is available in more than 70 international editions, covering 35 languages.
